slavery

slavery,

historicially, an institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States. Since the 20th cent., the term slavery has been more broadly understood as including forced labor generally.

History

Although it is commonly held that slavery was rare among primitive pastoral peoples and that it appeared in full form only with the development of an agricultural economy, there are numerous instances that contradict this belief. Domestic slavery and sometimes concubine slavery appeared among the nomadic Arabs, among Native Americans primarily devoted to hunting, and among the seafaring Vikings. Some ascribe the beginnings of slavery to war and the consequent subjection of one group by another. Slavery as a result of debt, however, existed in very early times, and some African peoples have had the custom of putting up wives and children as hostages for an obligation; if the obligation was unfulfilled, the hostages became permanent slaves.

Slavery in the Ancient World

The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. References to it appear in the ancient Babylonian code of Hammurabi. Its form and nature varied greatly in ancient society. It seems to have been common in the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations and in ancient Persia. It may not have been common in ancient Egypt until the New Kingdom or later, and the belief that slaves built the pyramids is probably incorrect. The institution was familiar to the ancient Hebrews, according to passages in the Bible.

Slavery was an established institution in the Greece of Homer's time, and a large portion of the population of the Greek city-states in later days were of the servile class. There were domestic slaves, agricultural slaves, and artisans and workers. In Greece, although not quite as commonly as in Asia Minor, there were also public slaves, for example, those belonging to the temples. In general it is thought that slaves in the Greek city-states were relatively well treated, and there were laws protecting them against excessive cruelty or abuse. However, the slaves were regarded as property and had no rights in courts of law. Slaves could obtain their freedom by buying it, by being granted it in the owner's will, or as a reward for outstanding service.

Slavery in early Roman history seems to have been of the same type as in Greece, but by the 1st cent. B.C., as the Roman Empire continued to expand, a form of agricultural slavery called estate slavery was introduced on a wide scale; in this form agriculture was pursued by large numbers of slaves in an impersonal relationship with the landowner, who had practically absolute power over them. The increasing wealth of Rome led to an expansion in domestic slaves, and the servile class grew to great numbers. They were employed in the theater, in gladiatorial combats, and, to some extent, in prostitution. Most of the slaves were foreign, and some were highly educated and were employed as instructors. Having a large retinue of slaves became one of the prime marks of luxury, and exotic, especially Asian, slaves were in great demand. As the number of conquered provinces grew, so did the slave supply. Consequently, manumission (emancipation from slavery) was common, and freedmen became a significant factor in the Roman social system. The slave had almost no legal status, although custom mitigated against extreme brutality; the slave could testify against his or her master only in a very limited number of serious crimes (adultery, incest, and, later, lese majesty). As the Roman expansion abated, conditions of slavery improved somewhat.

Slavery after the Fall of the Roman Empire

The introduction of Christianity toward the end of the Roman Empire had no effect on the abolition of slavery, since the church at that time did not oppose the institution. However, a change in economic life set in and resulted in the gradual disappearance of the agricultural slaves, who became, for all practical purposes, one with the coloni (tenant farmers who were technically free but were in fact bound to the land by debts). This process helped prepare the way for an economy in which the agricultural slave became the serf.

The semifreedom of serfdom was the dominant theme in the Middle Ages, although domestic slavery (and, to some extent, other forms) did not disappear. The church began to encourage manumission, while ignoring the fact that many slaves were attached to church officials and church property. Sale into slavery continued to be an extreme punishment for serious crimes.

Slavery flourished in the Byzantine Empire, and the pirates of the Mediterranean continued their custom of enslaving the victims of their raids. Islam, like Christianity, accepted slavery, and it became a standard institution in Muslim lands, where most slaves were African in origin. In Islamic life, keeping slaves was largely a sign of wealth, with slaves used as soldiers, concubines, cooks, and entertainers and to perform a variety of other functions. Another form of Muslim slavery was in the eunucheunuch[Gr.,=keeper of the couch], castrated human male, particularly a chamberlain of a harem in Asia. The custom of employing eunuchs as servants in wealthy or royal households is very ancient; it reached its epitome at the court of Constantinople under the Byzantine emperors,.....Click the link for more information. guardians of the harems; eunuchs had been widely known in Greek, Roman, and especially Byzantine times, but it was among the Muslims and in East Asia that they were to survive longest. In Muslim countries, slavery and freedom had a much more fluid boundary than in the West, with some slaves and former slaves reaching positions of great power and prestige.

In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later Middle Ages, although it still remained in such manifestations as the use of slaves on galleys. In Russia slavery persisted longer than in Western Europe, and indeed the serfs were pushed into the classification of slavery by Peter the Great.

Modern Slavery

A revolution in the institution of slavery came in the 15th and 16th cent. The explorations of the African coast by Portuguese navigators resulted in the exploitation of the African as a slave, and for nearly five centuries the predations of slave raiders along the coasts of Africa were to be a lucrative and important business conducted with appalling brutality. The British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese all engaged in the African slave trade. Although Africans were, as early as 1440, brought back to Portugal, and although subsequent importations were large enough to change distinctly the ethnography of that country, it was not in Europe that African slavery was to be most profitable and widespread, but in the Americas, where European exploitation began at the end of the 15th cent.

The first people to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese in the West Indies and Latin America were the Native Americans, but, because the majority of Native American slaves either revolted or escaped, other forms of forced labor, akin to serfdom, were introduced (see repartimientorepartimiento, in Spanish colonial practice, usually, the distribution of indigenous people for forced labor. In a broader sense it referred to any official distribution of goods, property, services, and the like......Click the link for more information. and encomiendaencomienda[Span. encomendar=to entrust], system of tributory labor established in Spanish America. Developed as a means of securing an adequate and cheap labor supply, the encomienda was first used over the conquered Moors of Spain......Click the link for more information.). The resistance of the Native Americans to slavery only increased the demand for Africans to replace them. Africans proved to be profitable laborers in the Caribbean islands and the lowlands of the South American mainland. In the colder highlands Native American slavery or quasislavery continued; long after the introduction of the first Africans the Paulistas (inhabitants of the city and state of São Paulo, Brazil) continued their slave raids against the Native Americans of the Brazilian hinterlands. But African slavery gradually became dominant.

The first Africans arrived in the British settlements on the Atlantic coast when they were traded or sold for supplies by a Dutch ship at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They may have been indentured servants, but by the 1640s lifetime servitude existed in Virginia, and slavery was acknowledged in the laws of Massachusetts. The raising of staple crops—coffee, tobacco, sugar, rice, and, much later, cotton—and the rise of the plantation economy made the importation of slaves from Africa particularly valuable in the Southern colonies of North America. The slave trade moved in a triangle; setting out from British ports, ships would transport various goods to the western coast of Africa, where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then brought to the West Indies or to the colonies of North or South America, where they were traded for agricultural staples for the return voyage back to England. Later, New England ports were included in this last leg. The number of slaves in the colonies increased until in some (notably French Saint-Domingue, the modern HaitiHaiti, Fr. Haïti , officially Republic of Haiti, republic (2005 est. pop. 8,122,000), 10,700 sq mi (27,713 sq km), West Indies, on the western third of the island of Hispaniola......Click the link for more information.) they constituted a majority of the population. In America by the date of the Declaration of Independence (1776) about one fifth of the population was enslaved.

The Antislavery Movement

The growth of humanitarian feeling during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th cent., the spread of the ideas of Jean Jacques RousseauRousseau, Jean Jacques, 1712–78, Swiss-French philosopher, author, political theorist, and composer. Life and Works

Rousseau was born at Geneva, the son of a Calvinist watchmaker......Click the link for more information. and others, and the increase of democratic sentiment led to a growing attack on the slave trade. The French Revolution had a great effect not only in the spread of agitation for human rights but more directly in the uprisings in Saint-Domingue and the establishment of Haitian independence. The movement for the abolition of slavery progressed slowly in the United States during the 18th and the first half of the 19th cent. Each of the Northern states gradually abolished the practice, but the prohibition of foreign slave trade promised in the Constitution (ratified in 1789) was not realized until 1808.

In Great Britain

British humanitarians who had incorporated the abolition of slavery into their conception of Christianity labored successfully to outlaw (1807) the British slave trade. These same men, especially William WilberforceWilberforce, William,1759–1833, British politician and humanitarian. He was elected to Parliament in 1780 and during the campaign formed a lifelong friendship with William Pitt, whose measures he generally supported in the House of Commons......Click the link for more information., Thomas ClarksonClarkson, Thomas,1760–1846, English abolitionist. He devoted most of his life to agitation against slavery, and the voluminous information that he gathered on the slave trade helped to influence Parliament......Click the link for more information., Zachary Macaulay, and Lord Brougham (Henry Peter BroughamBrougham, Henry Peter, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, 1778–1868, British statesman, b. Edinburgh. As a young lawyer in Scotland he helped to found (1802) the Edinburgh Review.....Click the link for more information.), continued to work for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, which was finally effected with the Abolition Act of 1833. However, according to some writers, the British, in abolishing slavery, were primarily motivated by economic, not humanitarian, interests. These critics argued that, while the institution produced great wealth under the mercantilist system, it became unprofitable with the rise of industrial capitalism, which displaced mercantilism early in the 19th cent. At any rate, the abolition legislation of 1833 was followed by the gradual abolition of slavery in all lands under British control, principally by the device of invalidating the legality of slavery and removing its legal safeguards, usually by recompensing the owners.

In the United States

Slavery proved unprofitable in the Northern states and by the early 19th cent. had disappeared. Its abolition had been hastened by the work of the Quakers, who, as in Great Britain, were staunchly opposed to the institution. In the South, however, where African slaves arrived in the tens of thousands from the late 17th through the early 18th cent., slavery came to be an integral part of the plantation system (especially after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793). From the late 18th cent. to the eve of the Civil War, more than a million slaves were moved from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South, where many labored in the sugar and cotton fields and where, as pressures for profits increased, treatment of slaves was particularly brutal. The vast internal slave trade, which often tore slave families apart, was the South's second largest enterprise; only the plantation system itself surpassed it in size.

In the Northern United States, humanitarian principles led to the appearance of the abolitionistsabolitionists,in U.S. history, particularly in the three decades before the Civil War, members of the movement that agitated for the compulsory emancipation of the slaves......Click the link for more information.. They knew little of the actual conditions in the South and were fighting not for economic reform but for idealistic principles. The abolitionists in general tended to regard slavery as an unmitigated evil. The small Northern farmer also feared slavery as a system of cheap labor against which it was difficult to compete.

The South, eager to conserve the status quo, developed a bellicose defense of the system, which was hardened by such factors as the slave uprising led by Nat TurnerTurner, Nat,1800–1831, American slave, leader of the Southampton Insurrection (1831), b. Southampton co., Va. Deeply religious from childhood, Turner was a natural preacher and possessed some influence among local slaves......Click the link for more information., the troubles over fugitive slaves, and the very active propaganda against the South. The question, involving the very existence of Southern society as then organized, was the dominant one in U.S. history from 1830 to 1860. The political expression of the struggle was largely an attempt on the part of the South to maintain legislative guarantees of the system against the efforts of the abolitionists.

The chief question concerned the right of extension of slavery in the Western territories. This first became important in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. Many leading statesmen of the time sought an answer: Henry ClayClay, Henry,1777–1852, American statesman, b. Hanover co., Va. Early Career

His father died when he was four years old, and Clay's formal schooling was limited to three years......Click the link for more information., the great compromiser; Daniel WebsterWebster, Daniel,1782–1852, American statesman, lawyer, and orator, b. Salisbury (now in Franklin), N.H. Early Career

He graduated (1801) from Dartmouth College, studied law, and, after an interval as a schoolmaster, was admitted (1805) to the bar......Click the link for more information.; John C. CalhounCalhoun, John Caldwell, 1782–1850, American statesman and political philosopher, b. near Abbeville, S.C., grad. Yale, 1804. He was an intellectual giant of political life in his day. Early Career

Calhoun studied law under Tapping Reeve at Litchfield, Conn......Click the link for more information.; Stephen A. DouglasDouglas, Stephen Arnold,1813–61, American statesman, b. Brandon, Vt. Senatorial Career

He was admitted to the bar at Jacksonville, Ill., in 1834. After holding various state and local offices he became a U.S......Click the link for more information., who proposed popular sovereigntypopular sovereignty,in U.S. history, doctrine under which the status of slavery in the territories was to be determined by the settlers themselves. Although the doctrine won wide support as a means of avoiding sectional conflict over the slavery issue, its meaning remained.....Click the link for more information. as means to decide the free or slave status of territories; and the uncompromising antislavery men, such as Charles SumnerSumner, Charles,1811–74, U.S. senator from Massachusetts (1851–74), b. Boston. He attended (1831–33) and was later a lecturer at Harvard law school, was admitted (1834) to the bar, and practiced in Boston. He spent the years 1837 to 1840 in Europe......Click the link for more information. and William H. SewardSeward, William Henry,1801–72, American statesman, b. Florida, Orange co., N.Y. Early Career

A graduate (1820) of Union College, he was admitted to the bar in 1822 and established himself as a lawyer in Auburn, N.Y., which he made his lifelong home......Click the link for more information.. The great compromises—the Missouri CompromiseMissouri Compromise,1820–21, measures passed by the U.S. Congress to end the first of a series of crises concerning the extension of slavery.

By 1818, Missouri Territory had gained sufficient population to warrant its admission into the Union as a state......Click the link for more information., the Compromise of 1850Compromise of 1850.The annexation of Texas to the United States and the gain of new territory by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the close of the Mexican War (1848) aggravated the hostility between North and South concerning the question of the extension of slavery into the.....Click the link for more information., and the Kansas-Nebraska ActKansas-Nebraska Act,bill that became law on May 30, 1854, by which the U.S. Congress established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. By 1854 the organization of the vast Platte and Kansas river countries W of Iowa and Missouri was overdue......Click the link for more information.—were ultimately ineffective.

Sectional opposition, which involved even broader questions than slavery, including the constitutional issue of states' rightsstates' rights,in U.S. history, doctrine based on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people......Click the link for more information., grew more passionate as the two sections became more and more hostile. The Ostend ManifestoOstend Manifesto,document drawn up in Oct., 1854, at Ostend, Belgium, by James Buchanan, American minister to Great Britain, John Y. Mason, minister to France, and Pierre Soulé, minister to Spain. William L......Click the link for more information. and the proposed annexation of Cuba, the fugitive slave lawsfugitive slave laws,in U.S. history, the federal acts of 1793 and 1850 providing for the return between states of escaped black slaves. Similar laws existing in both North and South in colonial days applied also to white indentured servants and to Native American slaves......Click the link for more information., the operations of the Underground RailroadUnderground Railroad,in U.S. history, loosely organized system for helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada or to areas of safety in free states. It was run by local groups of Northern abolitionists, both white and free blacks......Click the link for more information., the furor caused by the Dred Scott CaseDred Scott Case,argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856–57. It involved the then bitterly contested issue of the status of slavery in the federal territories. In 1834, Dred Scott, a black slave, personal servant to Dr. John Emerson, a U.S......Click the link for more information., the Wilmot ProvisoWilmot Proviso,1846, amendment to a bill put before the U.S. House of Representatives during the Mexican War; it provided an appropriation of $2 million to enable President Polk to negotiate a territorial settlement with Mexico......Click the link for more information.—all heightened the tension. Sporadic armed conflict erupted in Kansas and in the Harpers Ferry raid of John BrownBrown, John,1800–1859, American abolitionist, b. Torrington, Conn. He spent his boyhood in Ohio. Before he became prominent in the 1850s, his life had been a succession of business failures in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York......Click the link for more information.. The struggle became more clearly defined as the Republican party was formed with a definite antislavery platform.

In the victory of the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham LincolnLincoln, Abraham, 1809–65, 16th President of the United States (1861–65). Early Life

Born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in backwoods Hardin co., Ky. (now Larue co.), he grew up on newly broken pioneer farms of the frontier......Click the link for more information. (1860), the South saw a threat to Southern institutions, and the Southern states in an effort to secure those institutions resorted to secessionsecession,in political science, formal withdrawal from an association by a group discontented with the actions or decisions of that association. The term is generally used to refer to withdrawal from a political entity; such withdrawal usually occurs when a territory or state.....Click the link for more information. and formed the ConfederacyConfederacy,name commonly given to the Confederate States of America(1861–65), the government established by the Southern states of the United States after their secession from the Union......Click the link for more information.. The Civil WarCivil War,in U.S. history, conflict (1861–65) between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy......Click the link for more information. followed, and the victory of the North brought an end to slavery in the United States. Lincoln's Emancipation ProclamationEmancipation Proclamation,in U.S. history, the executive order abolishing slavery in the Confederate States of America. Desire for Such a Proclamation

In the early part of the Civil War, President Lincoln refrained from issuing an edict freeing the slaves despite.....Click the link for more information. (issued in 1863, it declared all slaves in the Southern secessionist states free) was followed by other legislation, especially the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The end of the Civil War did not result in the integration of the former slaves into American life. Although there were gains toward this under ReconstructionReconstruction,1865–77, in U.S. history, the period of readjustment following the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, the defeated South was a ruined land. The physical destruction wrought by the invading Union forces was enormous, and the old social and economic.....Click the link for more information., these were subsequently reversed by the Jim Crow lawsJim Crow laws,in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. The name is believed to be derived from a character in a popular minstrel song......Click the link for more information.. Generally easily identified by the color of their skin, African Americans were subjected to segregation and other forms of discrimination practiced by most white Americans and legislated in many jurisdictions. This situation did not begin to be ameliorated until the civil-rights struggles of the 20th cent. (see civil rightscivil rights,rights that a nation's inhabitants enjoy by law. The term is broader than "political rights," which refer only to rights devolving from the franchise and are held usually only by a citizen, and unlike "natural rights," civil rights have a legal as well as a.....Click the link for more information.; integrationintegration,in U.S. history, the goal of an organized movement to break down the barriers of discrimination and segregation separating African Americans from the rest of American society......Click the link for more information.).

In the late 20th cent. the idea of compensating American blacks for their enslavement through some form of reparations won widespread support from African-American organizations and greater notice, although little support, from the broader society. The reparations movement was spurred in part by payments to HolocaustHolocaust, name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Romani (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and others were also victims of the Holocaust......Click the link for more information. victims, to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and to some Native American tribes. Unlike these groups, however, reparations for slavery would be paid to individuals who are descendants by several generations of the victims, instead of to the victims or to a tribal people. Supporters of reparations, however, argue that contemporary African Americans continue to suffer from the vestiges of slavery and the discrimination that followed emancipation.

In Other Countries

In other countries emancipation of slaves was also a serious problem, but never to such an extent as in the United States, chiefly perhaps because the question of race prejudice was nowhere else so important. As the South American nations gained independence, they broadened their democratic principles to include absolute prohibition of slavery (Chile in 1823, Central America in 1824, Mexico in 1829, and Bolivia in 1831) or gradual emanicpation (Argentina in 1813, Colombia in 1814, and Venezuela in 1821). In BrazilBrazil, Port. Brasil, officially Federative Republic of Brazil, republic (2005 est. pop. 186,113,000), 3,286,470 sq mi (8,511,965 sq km), E South America. By far the largest of the Latin American countries, Brazil occupies nearly half the continent of South America,.....Click the link for more information. the opposition of the planters to abolishing slavery was strong, and it was only after a series of rather ineffective measures that the slaves were emancipated in 1888. Opposition to that action helped to launch the revolution of 1889.

In later years the slave trade was conducted on the east coast of Africa, the market being in Muslim lands. Most antislavery efforts during the 19th cent. were directed against slave trading. Great Britain had passed antislave-trade laws in 1807 and 1811; the British attempted to enlist other nations in an effort to stop the slave trade, and several treaties for such a purpose were signed in the 1840s. However, the first important international agreement was not reached until the Berlin Conference in 1885, which bound the more important Muslim potentates to act against the slave traffic. This was supplemented by the even more significant Brussels Act of 1890, to which 18 states were signatory.

The emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was unable to prevent traffic from that land to Arabia, and a brisk trade went on over the Red Sea. International scandals occurred from time to time with regard to forced labor; three notable ones concerned the Congo, LiberiaLiberia(New Lat.,=place of freedom), officially Republic of Liberia, republic (2005 est. pop. 3,482,000), 43,000 sq mi (111,370 sq km), W Africa. Liberia fronts on the Atlantic Ocean for some 350 mi (560 km) on the southwest and is bordered on the northwest by Sierra Leone, on.....Click the link for more information., and the Putumayo region of Peru in the 1930s (Native American servitude). The League of Nations adopted the resolutions of the International Slavery Convention of 1926, which was considered an advance over the Brussels Act of 1890; its main weakness was in not providing a permanent commission to oversee the total abolition of slavery. Slavery continued to exist in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and, despite increasingly successful efforts to abolish it, in various parts of Africa.

The United Nations has continued the efforts of the League of Nations to achieve worldwide abolition of slavery. The Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, contained a provision prohibiting slavery or trading in slaves. The Security Council in 1954 condemned systems of forced labor, particularly those employed as a means of political coercion. In 1956 a UN conference of plenipotentiaries adopted a convention on the abolition of slavery; an important aspect of the convention was the inclusion of other institutions similar to slavery as practices to be abolished. However, a report prepared for the United Nations in 1966 charged that slavery still existed in parts of Africa and Asia.

Although efforts to end involuntary servitude continued throughout the last half of the 20th cent., by the beginning of the 21st cent. forms of slavery, forced, or bonded labor still persisted in a number of countries, e.g., Mauritania, Niger, and Sudan in Africa, Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, and parts of the Persian Gulf region in Asia, and the Amazon region of Brazil. More isolated instances have been occasionally revealed elsewhere, e.g., involving Asian immigrants in the United States and sub-Saharan African migrants in parts of Libya. In many cases of forced labor, workers have been deceptively recruited in their home countries and then deprived of their passports and forced to work under altered contractual terms once they have arrived in a foreign country.

Bibliography

See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896, repr. 1970); A. H. Abel, The Slaveholding Indians (3 vol., 1915–25; repr. 1970); R. H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire (1928, repr. 1968); U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929, repr. 1963); W. L. Westermann, Upon Slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt (1929); W. L. Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (1926, repr. 1967), Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865 (1929, repr. 1967), and British Slave Emancipation, 1838–1849 (1932, repr. 1967); E. Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (4 vol., 1930–35; repr. 1965); G. MacMann, Slavery through the Ages (1938); R. Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (1939, repr. 1968); I. E. Edwards, Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery (1942); E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944, repr. 1964); Fisk Univ., Social Science Institute, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-Slaves (1945, repr. 1970); G. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (tr. 1946; 2d ed. 1956, repr. 1963); I. Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (1949); K. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956); C. W. W. Greenidge, Slavery (1958); M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (1960, repr. 1968); S. O'Callaghan, The Slave Trade Today (1962); D. P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (with M. Cowley, 1962); J. Williamson, After Slavery (1965); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); A. Zilversmidt, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); S. M. Elkins, Slavery (2d ed. 1968); A. Weinstein, ed., American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader (1968); L. Foner and E. D. Genovese, ed., Slavery in the New World (1969); D. L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (1970); R. S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1970); J. Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle (1971); A. J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery (1971); R. W. Winks, Slavery: A Comparative Perspective (1972); R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974); E. D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974); J. A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981); E. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988); C. B. Dew, Bond of Iron (1994); H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (1997); P. D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint (1998); K. Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999); J. H. Franklin and L. Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (1999); R. L. Paquette and L. A. Ferleger, ed., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (2000); R. Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (2001); I. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003); A. Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (2005); S. Deyle, Carry Me Back (2005); E. Fox-Genovese and E. D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005); S. Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006); D. A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008); Y. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009); S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009); G. W. Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010); D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010); H. Zinn, The Other Civil War: Slavery and Struggle in Civil War America (2011); J. Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012); W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013); E. E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); R. S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (2014); G. Grandin, The Empire of Necessity (2014).

slavery

institutionalized domination over persons who have no property or birth rights, who are often treated as the property of another, and who are subject to control in all aspects of their lives, with no enforceable limits. Such a system, in which the slave is dominated by a slave master, is often referred to as chattel slavery, which may be distinguished from other forms of unfreedom and unfree labour such as SERFDOM and debt bondage (see DEBT PEONAGE).

In the most comprehensive comparative study of slavery, O. Patterson (1982) argues that there are three universal features. First, a slave master has virtually unlimited rights of violence or threat of violence over a slave; secondly, a slave experiences ‘natal alienation’ being genealogically isolated and denied all rights of birth; thirdly, a slave has no honour. Unlike other definitions of slavery Patterson shows that in many societies masters had little interest in what slaves produced. For example, in kin-based societies in Africa, slaves were acquired as a means of increasing the number of dependants, and hence the prestige, of the master with little resulting economic difference between the master and slave. So the experience of Ancient Greece and Rome and the antebellum Southern states of North America from the 17th to the 19th century, where enslavement was primarily for labour purposes, cannot be incorporated in a general definition of slavery.

Patterson further questions the usual definition of slaves as being the property of the masters. He argues that, viewed comparatively, the concept of property in connection with slavery is socially variable with the legal recognition of absolute property common in Europe but not universal, emerging only with Roman law. This concept of absolute property may have emerged from the institution of slavery rather than the other way round. Patterson points out that other categories of dependants may be defined as the property of others, so that this in itself may not distinguish slaves: rather the distinctive feature is that slaves are denied rights of property (except for the peculium whereby the master invested partial and temporary rights of possession (see USUFRUCT) in the slave, but with ownership rights still vested in the master). Thus, in defining slavery Patterson omits the concept of ownership and on the level of personal relations defines it as ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons’.

Near-universal correlates of slavery have been the sexual abuse of female slaves by their masters, the high frequency of concubinage and sometimes marriage between master and slave, and the rarity of enslavement of members of the master's own ETHNIC GROUP (with Russia in the 17th- and 18th-centuries being one of the few examples of such a practice).

Since slavery has existed in many known societies from the very beginning of human history, there have been many variations in the practice and institutions. Some societies such as Ancient Greece and Rome (see ANCIENT SOCIETY), the US, Brazil and many parts of the Caribbean from the late 17th century to the mid-19th, may be termed slave-holding societies, in as much as the ruling classes derived most of their wealth by extracting ECONOMIC SURPLUS from slaves, even though, as in Ancient Greece and Rome, this may not have been the most prevalent form of labour (de Ste. Croix, 1981). Other variations are in the means of enslavement, of which capture in warfare and kidnapping have historically been the most important, accounting for the majority of slaves in the Atlantic slave trade between the 17th and 19th centuries. Other means have included penal enslavement, the main source of slaves in Imperial China, and birth, with many variations between societies in how slave status was inherited, e.g. Roman practice was for slave status to derive from the mother, but under the Near Eastern and Islamic rule the higher status of the parents was decisive, meaning that children of mixed (slave and free) parentage usually became free. The means of acquiring slaves has also varied, internal or external trade being among the most common (Patterson even argues that slavery may have been involved with the origins of trade) and dowry and bride payments.

A final main variation concerns manumission practices, the freeing of slaves. The best-known slavery system in the modern world, that of the southern USA, is unusual in that manumission rates were amongst the lowest known. In many systems, slaves often became free on the death of their master, through marriage or concubinage with the master, especially in Islamic societies, by adoption, or through political manumission, e.g. by the state in recognition of acts of bravery in warfare. On freedom, however, the slave often remained in a dependent relationship with the ex-master, although, again, the US South was exceptional in granting such low status to freed slaves.

No known slave masters have succeeded in totally controlling all slaves or in having them accept totally their dishonoured status (compare DIALECTIC OF CONTROL). Thus slave rebellion has been a constant feature throughout history, although the lack of any ready basis for unity among slaves means that the only documented successful overthrow of a slavery system by rebellion was in San Domingo in the French Caribbean 1791-1803 (see James, 1980). As with all systems of domination, the sole use of violence as a means of control is self-destructive, so that various other incentives have figured, primarily the possibility of freedom, but also the right to acquire possessions which may be used to buy freedom. The extent to which slave systems subordinate psychologically, by the creation of a 'slave mentality’ (e.g. ‘Uncle Tomism’), has been challenged recently (see Weinstein and Gatell, 1979; Genovese, 1971).

Debate also exists as to whether slave systems are inherently inefficient compared with non-slave systems (e.g. involve more costs of social control, social subsistence and labour reproduction, and involve less flexibility in use of capital). Associated with this is the question of whether their elimination has been brought about primarily by economic or political considerations. The suggestion is that slave systems only become established where other forms of labour are in short supply and/or where a ready source of slave labour exists.

Slavery

the earliest and most overt form of exploitation, in which the slave, together with the instruments of production, is the property of his master, the slaveholder. In the most extreme forms of slavery, the slave had absolutely no rights. Devoid of any economic incentive to work, he labored only under direct physical compulsion. Sometimes the status of slaves was also emphasized by such visible symbols as a brand, collar, or special clothing. Appearing at the time of the dissolution of the primitive communal system, slavery was the basis of the slave-holding system. Slaves were members of foreign tribes taken prisoner in time of war or captured in military operations designed specifically for that purpose (raids, piracy), as well as members of the same tribe who had been enslaved for not paying their debts or for committing crimes. The number of slaves also grew through a natural increase in the existing slave population and through the slave trade.

The earliest form of slavery was patriarchal slavery, in which the slaves were considered members without rights of the family that owned them. They usually lived under the same roof as their master but performed heavier tasks than the other members of the family. The patriarchal form of slavery is closely related to the existence of a natural economy. This form of slavery existed to a certain extent among all nations during their transition to class societies. It predominated in the societies of the ancient East, as well as in the Greek states and Rome, until rapid economic development changed slavery in these states into the form that it assumed in antiquity. For Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and for the late Roman Republic, patriarchal slavery was already a thing of the past. “Classical” slavery had become firmly established in conjunction with a market economy and the maximum expropriation of the slave as an individual—the loss of all his rights and his transformation into a “talking tool.”

Classical slavery flourished for a relatively short time since the very nature of slave labor caused its inevitable downfall and transformation: the slaves’ hatred of their work and the oppression could only lead to the economic inefficiency of slavery and necessarily required at least a basic modification of the forms of servile dependence. Historical factors, such as the reduction in the supply of slaves and the constant slave rebellions, reinforced the economic factors in impelling slaveholders to find new forms of exploitation. The necessity of providing the direct producers with an incentive to work and thereby increasing the efficiency of their exploitation was becoming quite apparent. Many slaves were then bound to the land and gradually merged with the coloni (colonatus system). This development, which had economic causes, resulted in the de facto disappearance of any differences between coloni and slaves.

Slavery played a considerable, but not a leading, role in the economy of the “barbarian” states that emerged on the territory of the Roman Empire in the early Middle Ages, particularly in the Ostrogoth state in Italy and the Visigoth state in Spain. In these states, many of the slaves worked the land and paid quitrent to a lord, thus gradually merging with the impoverished members of peasant communes to create a group of enserfed peasants. By the 13th century, slavery had almost completely disappeared from most of Western Europe, although an extensive slave trade still flourished down to the 16th century in such Mediterranean cities as Venice and Genoa, which imported slaves from Turkey and sold them in North Africa.

In Byzantium slavery disappeared at a much slower rate than in Western Europe. It was still economically significant in the tenth and 11th centuries, but by the late 11th and 12th centuries the merger of slaves with the dependent peasantry was practically completed in Byzantium as well. Slavery existed in the Germanic and Slavic tribes chiefly in its patriarchal form; among the Slavs, only the Dalmations traded in slaves. In ancient Rus’ slavery still existed between the ninth and 12th centuries within the framework of a developing feudal society. The slaves (kholopy) gradually joined the ranks of the dependent peasantry, most of them becoming household serfs. However, the situation of certain groups of serfs, particularly those working in mines, differed very little from that of slaves. Slavery continued to exist down to the sixth century in the ancient kingdoms of Transcaucasia and Middle Asia; vestiges of slavery could still be observed there during the Middle Ages.

In the largest Oriental states, notably China and India, slavery existed in its patriarchal form until the onset of capitalist relations, and sometimes it did not disappear even when the latter became established. The main source of slavery in this part of the world in the Middle Ages was indebtedness. In China, impoverished peasants frequently sold members of their own families into slavery, and throughout the entire medieval period criminals or members of their families became slaves of the state. Slavery was also relatively widespread in the Muslim countries of the Near East. Because Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims, the main source of slavery in Muslim countries was prisoners captured in the course of wars against the “infidels” and the purchase of slaves in the markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the Muslim countries, slaves were used for heavy labor, such as mining (Zinji), in the armies of Muslim rulers (Ghulams, Mamelukes), and in households and personal service (including harems).

The spread of slavery throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas beginning in the 16th century is linked to the process known as the primitive accumulation of capital and to the colonial subjugation of the countries in these areas. Slavery was most extensive and assumed the greatest economic importance in the colonies on the American continent owing to the specific development of the colonies in the Americas: the lack of manpower and the presence of uninhabited land that could be used for large-scale plantation agriculture. The opposition of the Indians, their extermination, and the formal prohibitions on enslaving Indians imposed by the rulers of Spain and Portugal prompted Spanish, Portuguese, and, later, North American planters to import Negro slaves from Africa. The slave trade reached its peak between the 17th and 19th centuries, and the total number of Negroes imported to the Americas probably exceeded 10 million.

In the late 18th century Negro slaves constituted the majority of the population in areas dominated by large plantations in the South of the USA, the West Indies, Brazil, and Guyana. Negroes were brutally treated on the plantations, where their status was that of draft animals. Only the slaves serving in the households of the plantation owners found themselves in a slightly better position. Unions between slaveholders and Negro concubines gave rise to a large mulatto population in several countries. The industrial revolution, which stimulated a sharp increase in the demand for cotton and other industrial crops, gave fresh impetus to the development of plantation slavery in the USA at the end of the 18th and first decade of the 19th century.

As capitalism developed, it became increasingly evident that slave labor had a low productivity and hampered the further evolution of productive forces. Under those circumstances the abolition of slavery began in response to the increasing opposition of slaves and to the growth of a large-scale antislavery social movement, exemplified by abolitionism in the USA. The French Revolution proclaimed the abolition of slavery, but this goal was achieved in reality in the French colonies only in the 1840’s. Slavery was legally abolished in Great Britain in 1807, but in fact continued to exist in the British colonies until 1833. Portugal proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the 1850’s, and in the 1860’s slavery was abolished in most states on the American continent. The abolition of slavery in the USA occurred as a result of the Civil War (1861–65) between the North and the slaveholding South. Forms of forced labor that differed little from slavery continued to exist after the latter had officially been abolished. They included peonage in Latin America and the system of contract laborers in Oceania. The institution of slavery persisted for a long time in a number of colonies and dependencies. It was particularly widespread in Portugal’s African colonies as part of the plantation economy and as a household institution. As late as the 1950’s slavery existed among the Arabs of central and southern Arabia and in such African countries as Ethiopia and Nigeria.

The struggle to eradicate slavery through international law began in the 19th century, but most international documents condemning slavery remained purely formal. What may be regarded as the first international antislavery convention was signed in Geneva in 1926 under the auspices of the League of Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, prohibited slavery and slave trade in all its forms (art. 4). A conference of 59 nations that convened in Geneva in 1956 for the purpose of combating slavery adopted a supplementary convention on the eradication of slavery, the slave trade, and institutions and customs similar to slavery, such as forced labor.

Roger--a professor at the Sorbonne, editor in chief of the review Critique and a member of the prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, a government-funded research institute--has assembled a gallery of all the negative commonplaces, stereotypes and cliches about the United States: bad climate, savage natives, Indian-killers, slavedrivers, robber barons, capitalist fat cats, unlivable cities, soulless scientists, etc.

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